Image: Just_Super / E+ via Getty Images

DPReview community, we wanted to provide you with a brief update on various community-focused initiatives over the past year. Spoiler alert - a lot's been happening!

The health of our community means everything to us. Our team has built a bond with many of you through discussions of digital photography and our shared passion for geeking out about the latest camera gear. Our editorial team - Dale Baskin, Richard Butler, Mitchell Clark, Abby Ferguson, and I – all enjoy getting your thoughts on our articles. It's this community interaction that makes DPReview thrive, and one that I personally want to do whatever it takes to keep it healthy and lasting.

Supporting the community

For the past 25 years, the DPReview forums have operated in parallel to, but largely independently from, our editorial operations. The editors are dedicated to writing engaging articles, but the interest in interacting with you all also takes a significant amount of time. To support and grow our community properly in the long term, it became clear that we urgently needed a dedicated Community Manager. That's why I was brought on, so the team could have a person dedicated to forum moderation, developing engaging content, and ensuring that support requests are responded to promptly (to name just a few parts of my role here).

Being a Community Manager in any capacity is a wonderful experience (and great responsibility), but I especially couldn't pass up the opportunity to help you all out. As soon as I joined DPReview, I began working closely with the team and volunteer moderators to understand the community's interests.

As a Community Manager, one of my central tenets for building a thriving community is to work directly and openly with members to ensure their needs are met. The most important thing we can do is to be more communicative with all of you about what's happening at DPReview, and just as importantly, ensure you are comfortable sharing your thoughts with us about what matters most to you.

Updating the forum system

The forums serve as a central hub for community discussions, so they must remain accessible at all times. It's a massive system that requires constant attention on both technical and moderation fronts. After more than a quarter-century of the forums in operation, our custom-built, proprietary solution had become too complex and expensive to maintain. If we wanted to keep the forums going, we had to find a solution that DPReview could viably preserve into the future.

In deciding what to do, the team had spent months researching individual software solutions that could address the current challenges. They understood the impact a significant change to the forum would have on the community. This included the viability of continuing to maintain an aging system. Long story short, it was clear that a new platform was the only feasible solution, even if it fell just a few features short of being an agreeable one for all users.

Soon after I was introduced to the volunteer moderators and informed of our forum update plans, I wanted to ensure that the community's voice would be represented through them as much as possible until we could publicly discuss it with you all. We collaborated to announce our migration intentions in all key forum areas. Everything unfolded quickly from that point, with the successful launch of the new platform in early November of this year.

Thankfully, the community showed great patience while we completed the migration, despite having concerns. Post-launch support has included gathering your ideas and suggestions on how we can further improve the forums. With just a few 'bug' type issues remaining, we are now moving on to addressing style improvements. These include the need to make notification indicators and forum index feeds easier to read.

Community initiatives in 2025

While the forum improvements continue, there are many other ways we can work together to develop exciting programs that drive interest across the forums. As a first step, I've reached out to several community leaders (volunteer moderators, frequently active posters, etc.) to ask them what they would like to see activated in the community for content and fun initiatives. If you weren't one of them, please feel free to reach out to me at any time as well.

So far, since July of this year, we've implemented the following content and programs:

• Community guidelines updated
• Question of the week series
• The very first community AMA
• Increased presence of the editorial team in the forums

I've barely scratched the surface of hearing from all of you, so please let me know what you think of the initiatives we've introduced so far.

There's one more significant community initiative we're testing this month on YouTube that hasn't been published yet, but will in just a few days. Be sure to keep watch in the forums for it!

Exciting plans for 2026

Our team has some super exciting plans to launch for you all in 2026. We are eager to continue the AMAs as a regular series about digital photography and your favorite camera gear. We'll keep the Question of the Week series going as well. And about that YouTube initiative you'll find out about in just a few more days, well, we hope you enjoy watching it and want more of that, too.

Thank you, community, for everything you've developed for one another. The DPReview team is here to provide support, so please don't hesitate to reach out anytime you need it.

Meanwhile, I hope you all have a safe and happy holidays!

Photo: Mitchell Clark

There's been a lot of talk about the Sony a7 V's dynamic range performance since PhotonsToPhotos released its data on it, showing that it, like the Panasonic S1II, combines the readouts of its low and high gain steps when using the mechanical shutter. We've had the opportunity to test the dynamic range for ourselves with the studio scene to see how it performs, and we can confirm: it is very impressive.

To start, this may be one of the most ISO invariant cameras we've seen to date when shooting with the standard, mechanical shutter mode. That means you have a lot of room to preserve highlights by shooting at lower ISOs, then brightening the image in post (a workflow that also translates well to shooting with HDR in mind). In our tests, we saw essentially no shadow cost to an image shot at ISO 400, brightened to match an image shot at ISO 6400 with the same exposure settings.

The results are comparable in electronic first curtain shutter mode, where the two reads of the sensor at different gain modes can be combined after the mechanical second shutter has closed.

The a7 V's exposure latitude is also very good, so you can dig quite deep into the shadows when processing your Raws. In mechanical shutter mode, it's a bit better than the a7 IV and peers like the Canon EOS R6 III and Nikon Z6III, and roughly on par with the Panasonic S1II.

As expected, its performance isn't as good in e-shutter mode, where it has less time to read out the sensor and therefore can't do it twice, as it can in its mechanical shutter mode. However, its peers' dynamic range performance also suffers in e-shutter mode, so none of the cameras end up with any particular advantage. Of course, the main reason to shoot in their e-shutter modes is to utilize their highest burst rates, where achieving maximum DR performance is less of a concern anyway.

While the a7 V's dynamic range advantage over its predecessor and peers isn't earth-shattering, it'll be exciting to those hoping to exploit the shadows in their images, such as landscape photographers, or those who often shoot to preserve highlights. Be sure to tune in after the New Year for more coverage on Sony's latest camera, including the rest of our studio scene results.

Note: these images were produced using a beta version of Adobe Camera Raw. While they're consistent with other testing that we've seen so far, we'll check to make sure the results are consistent with those produced by the final version of ACR once it's released.